Saturday, April 13, 2013

MOVIES MADE ME #57: STAND BY ME (1986)

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Stephen King says this is the question he gets more than any
other -- because many people assume that any man who spends his life writing
horror novels must be a bit warped in the head.For many years, the author had a
simple, stock answer to this question:

“Utica.”

Later he wrote a book -- called Danse Macabre -- to seriously answer the question
once and for all.Apparently that didn’t stop anyone from asking it, and when the 1986
film STAND BY ME (adapted from King’s novella “The Body”) came out, people
asked that question more than ever…. Because the story of “The Body” seemed
like something that could have been
entirely autobiographical.STAND
BY ME beautifully recounts the coming-of-age tale of four boys who go on a
pilgrimage to see a dead body.It
doesn’t sound like much, but the writing and the acting make every single
moment shine.

The characters seem real, King says, because they are based
on real events.That’s not to say
that any of the four boys are based entirely on one person -- although it’s
worth noting that the narrator, Gordie Lachance, grew up to “parlay his
childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars.”It’s also worth noting that King’s
childhood best friend, like Gordie’s, is named Chris.Still, King maintains that no fiction writer is ever true to
life.They take elements of the
real world, he says, and embellish the hell out of them.King’s childhood friend Chris Chesley
has confirmed this, saying, “None of the characters are based on specific
people, yet there are salient characteristics of individuals which are very
reminiscent of people that he and I knew in common.”

Another reason that the characters seem real is because
of the contributions of screenwriters Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, producer Andrew Scheinman and
director Rob Reiner.According to Reiner’s commentary on the special edition DVD of
the film, each of them added phrases and details from their own childhoods.Much of the voiceover narration and
dialogue is lifted straight out of King’s novella, but there are also new
additions -- like “Two for flinching!” and “That's weird... what the hell is Goofy?”The scenes revolving around Ace’s gang
are also unique to the film. But the most significant changes are in the way
that Reiner fleshed out the character of Gordie.

Reiner says that Gordie’s relationship with his father
and his brother are partly based on the director's relationship with his own father
and brother.In King’s novella,
Gordie says he wasn’t particularly close to his brother.His brother’s death cast a pall over
his life for a few years, but it didn’t make him feel that his father hated
him, nor did it solidify the bond between Gordie and Chris.The great line that River Phoenix
(as Chris) delivers halfway through the film, about how “kids lose everything
these days unless there’s someone there to look out for them,” comes from
Reiner, not King.In short, Reiner
has put a greater emphasis on Gordie’s character arc, even going so far as to
give him the gun in the final showdown, as a demonstration of his newfound
strength.(In King’s novella, it’s
Chris who pulls the gun on Ace.)That all makes for a more cohesive
story, amplifying the themes of King’s story.

The third, and perhaps most significant, reason that the
events of STAND BY ME seem real is because of what the actors brought to their
individual roles.Seriously,
this may be the best cast of the 1980s.Wil Wheaton perfectly captures the sensitivity and
vulnerability of Gordie.River Phoenix
is brilliant as an adult trapped in a kid’s body, and one who senses that he
will not fare so well as an adult.(This turned out to be a terrible truth for the young actor.)Corey Feldman projects the reckless
anger of Teddy Duchamp.Reiner
says Feldman was the only actor he auditioned who had that kind of rage inside
him at age 11.And Jerry
O’Connell is eminently goofy as the absent-minded Vern.On top of that, we’ve got John Cusack
as the ideal older brother and Kiefer Sutherland as a truly dangerous juvenile
delinquent.(Back in the 80s, everybody wanted to hang out with John
Cusack, and everybody was afraid of
Kiefer Sutherland.)From what I
can tell, all of these parts were typecast.A filmmaker friend once told me that you can rely on
adult actors to adopt personalities that are very different from their own, but you can't often rely on child actors to play someone other than themselves.Reiner obviously knew the characters well enough to spot them in real
life.In a way, these
characters really did / do exist!

Which leads me back to my original question: How much of
STAND BY ME is real?The
characters may be real enough, but what about the dead kid?What about the train dodge?What about the leeches?In a 1986 lecture, King insisted that
“almost every incident in that book actually happened.” He added, “I have leech
scars in several places on my body” to prove it.As for the train dodge and the dead kid, these two events
may be drawn from a single-real life event.Here’s what King said in a 1980 interview:

“[My mother] said I
was out playing one day with this friend of mine.I was about four.I came home, deadly pale, and I’d peed in my pants.And I didn’t want to talk.She asked me what happened, but I went
upstairs and closed the door and stayed in my room all afternoon.She found out that night that this kid
I had been playing with had been run over by a train, okay?I can remember her telling me that they
picked up the pieces in a basket.A wicker basket. I don’t remember anything about it; the chances are
very good that by that time he had wandered off on his own somewhere and that I
wasn’t anywhere around.There’s a
small chance that maybe I did see it
happen, maybe the kid chased his ball onto the tracks or something.

He tells a similar version of the story in Danse Macabre, which was written around
the same time.Oddly enough, a few
years later, King cited a completely different inspiration:

“I had a roommate in
college, George McCloud, to whom this story is dedicated.He grew up in a little, what I’d call
upscale, trendy community; a place like Westin, Massachusetts, where all the
girls wear A-line skirts and cardigans and that kind of thing.He said he’d never seen a dead animal.Where he lived there was a
street-cleaning team, and if there were sparrows or woodchucks or anything that
got plastered in the road, they were sort of scraped up before little kids
whose minds could be warped were up and outside.One day at their summer camp, or whatever it was, a story
circulated that a dog had been hit by a train and the dead body was on the
tracks.These guys are saying,
‘And you should see it, man, it’s all swelled up and its guts are falling out
and it’s real dead.I mean it’s just as dead as you ever
dreamed of anything ever being dead.’And you could see it yourself just walk down these tracks and take a
look at it, which they did.George
said, ‘Someday I’d like to write a story about that,’ but he never did.He’s running some restaurant now, a
great restaurant.So about five
years ago I went to him and said, ‘I took your idea and I wrote a story about
these kids who walk down a railroad track to find the body of a boy.’I didn’t think anybody would be too
interested in going to look at the body of a dog.”

In a 1990 interview with Stephen Spignesi, Chris Chesley suggested yet another real-life basis
for the story:

One night a friend of
mine came by and asked Steve and I if we wanted to go see a dead body.He had heard about somebody who had
gone down to the river one summer evening - a guy who had never learned to
swim.When we got to the river it
was already dark.We sat on some
rocks set back from the scene, but close enough to see down to the low place
where people usually put their boats in the water.The gathering had chased the whippoorwills away, and the
lights placed to advantage were bright.No one was in a hurry.They
looked like men searching for some reason to stand around, as if something in
the back of their minds slowed them down.The photographer seemed to be taking too many pictures.The men did official things, but beyond
that there was an air of lingering in order to find out a secret.They made small, restrained gestures at
the shape, moved toward it, moved away.The body was inhuman; its sense of extreme difference and distance was
subduing and forbidding.We looked
and looked at its sunken mystery, but in some strange way it was in vain.Then they covered up the body and we
went home.

So which story is the truth?Personally, I can’t help wondering if King made up the first
story, just to appease interviewers who desperately want to believe that his
writing is a product of some kind of childhood trauma.It’s a pretty convenient story, isn’t it?And what’s the difference,
really, between making up a story for an interviewer and making up a story for
a reader?The writer’s obligation,
in both cases, is to entertain, and that's what he does.Since “The Body” is actually dedicated
to George McCloud, I’m inclined to think that the second story is true… but, of
course, it’s much less dramatic.Maybe King fused that narrative with the experience that Chris Chesley
remembers to produce “The Body”?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where the story
came from.It’s a good story, and
just as honest as any memory.Our
memories, after all, are constantly changing.We like to think that remembered experiences are solid and unchanging,
but that’s bullshit.Memories are
not digital files and our brains are not computers.Every time we remember something, we are remembering it in a
slightly different context.We are
telling ourselves a story, based on hard truth but modified for the occasion of our
remembering. If we didn't do that, our memories would not be valuable.

The best thing about King’s novella, and the thing that makes
it stand apart from Reiner’s excellent film adaptation, is the way the author
blurs fact and fiction.Throughout
the story, he is continually bringing the reader back to an awareness of a dead
kid named Ray Brower.Why?Because, to the characters in the
story, Ray Brower is very real.In
the film, when the four boys are camping out at night, they joke about the dead
kid’s ghost walking in the woods.Each of them express fear in believable ways, but the viewer understands
that the ghost exists only in their imaginations… because STAND BY ME is firmly
grounded in conventional reality.King’s fiction is not.

King creates his own reality, and it’s a place where there
are, so to speak, “more things in heaven and earth” than most of us acknowledge in our everyday lives.King’s talent
is his ability to transport himself, and us, into the mind of a young boy who believes in the possibility of ghosts,
and whose belief makes those ghosts real -- at least, as real as anything else in life.Because Gordie believes that Ray Brower’s spirit might be stalking them,
we believe it too.When we are
reading, there is no line of demarcation between fact and fiction.The limit of reality is the limit
of our imagination.

4 comments:

One of my favorite movies. And what a perfect example to use for your subject. For myself, my retelling of memories is usually very specific. That was on the right, this was on the left, the room was cold, the air smelled of cut grass, etc. Somewhat photographic. Now retelling truth into fiction, ah, that is another beast. Characters and incidents tend to be a conglomeration of pieces from here and there. But I notice that the longer I write, the more that it all takes on its own life and leads me in the direction that IT wants to take.

Thanks, Terri. Your comment reminds me of what Lance keeps saying about the comic: "We're channeling this story." Without the proper context, that sounds like a ridiculous statement. I don't really believe in channeling in the mediumistic sense... or, at least, I don't believe that it produces good writing. I couldn't, for the life of me, get through W.B. Yeats' "A Vision"... and I remember reading a painfully bad book by a woman who claimed that she was channeling T.S. Eliot's ghost. (I know, I know... I'm a sucker for even picking that book up.) Having said all of that, I absolutely believe that an element of surrender is required to produce any kind of worthwhile fiction. You can plan all you want, but a good story is like life... It's not going to follow your instructions. Thanks for your comment!

About Me

Author - Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (McFarland, 2004), The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences (McFarland, 2009), Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen (Bloody Pulp, 2011), To Hell You Ride (Dark Horse Comics, 2013), A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin (BearManor, 2014), Beyond Fear: Reflections on Stephen King, Wes Craven and George Romero's Living Dead (BearManor, 2014), and The Quick, The Dead and the Revived: The Many Lives of the Western Film (McFarland, 2016).